Walter Hill Returns to Features with St. Vincent

Walter Hill Returns to Features with St. Vincent

Walter Hill is one of Hollywood’s most neglected master action directors, mostly because he has directed more classics (48 Hours, The Long Riders, The Warriors, Broken Trail) than commercial hits. So it’s good news that his indie-financed St. Vincent appears to be moving forward, with a July 12 start of production in Detroit. The crime thriller written by Cameron Young stars Pierce Brosnan as a hitman who disguises himself as a priest to kill a gangland traitor (Billy Bob Thornton). Giovanni Ribisi and Maria Bello also star.

Financed by Premier National Studios and Quickfire Films and produced by Claudio Castravelli, Irish Dreamtime’s Beau St. Claire and Jon Turtle, the film is being sold by IM Global at Cannes.

Comments

EXTREME PREJUDICE, JOHNNY HANDSOME and TRESPASS are three of the best crime thrillers of the last 25 years. For a few years there, he was the logical successor to Anthony Mann, Robert Aldrich, Don Siegel, Phil Karlson and Sam Peckinpah. But he hasn’t done anything of that caliber since GERONIMO in 1993.

Walter Hill is indeed an underappreciated auteur. The Long Riders, 48 Hours, Southern Comfort, The Warriors, are much better than average genre pictures, and come to think about it, Long Riders is near-great. Look forward to St. Vincent.

I’m hard core Walter Hill fan. (Well O.K. he could have done without Another 48 Hours and Brewster’s Millions but name me a director who has films he regrets?) I was just watching again my DVD of The Long Riders. Just great! But I’ve been waiting so long for him to come back to the big screen. He can teach these filmmakers today a thing or two. And now his films are slowly but surely coming out on Blu ray like Johnny Handsome in July